COMMON PASSIONS FUEL RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM

STANFORD -- There has been a resurgence of religious militance around the
globe that, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, was not predicted and is
still underestimated by most university scholars, says Gabriel Almond,
recognized as the father of comparative politics.

"Everyone thought when Clarence Darrow won the verdict in the Scopes
trial, that was the last peep out of religious orthodoxy and tradition," said
the 82-year-old Almond, Stanford University professor emeritus of political
science.

Today, Christian fundamentalists have substantial influence in the
Republican Party, Islamic fundamentalists won the last election in Algeria,
Iran has undergone an Islamic revolution, fundamentalist Jewish settlers on
the West Bank are a political force in Israel, and Hindu religious militants
have threatened the authority of the secular Indian state.

What these movements share in common, Almond said, is that they are
"reactions against the modern secular world and its twin engines of
modernization - technology and science."

The ratio of church-goers to non-church-goers hasn't changed much in the
United States over the last 30 years.

"While the mainline denominations like Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
Lutheran and Methodist are in decline, the more militant, evangelical and
Pentecostal denominations have sharply increased in numbers, Almond said.

"It's the intensity of feeling that counts, rather than the numbers of
people who have certain kinds of beliefs. You have more people now who are
ready to fight for religious causes in the streets."

Almond works from his campus home as one of 200 scholars around the world
engaged in a six-year, six-volume study of religious fundamentalism on five
continents. Directed by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby of the University of
Chicago, the project already has produced three of these volumes, published
by the University of Chicago Press. Almond's own work involves collaboration
with other scholars in the project, partly by electronic mail.

"There is particular irony in the fact that electronic mail and modern
medicine allow me to work on a project that is really a study of the
rejection of the modern," Almond said one afternoon recently as he took a
break from his computer.

Having survived heart bypass surgery in 1978, Almond is part of a new
phenomenon on campuses: scholars who are active for decades beyond their
teaching years.

"I am lucky I took typing in high school, and my last graduate student got
me equipped and moving with a computer in 1986. I don't really need to travel
to collaborate," Almond said.

He will travel, however, to Jerusalem in September for a meeting of three
scholars who are writing the final chapter in the mammoth project - a
comparison of 18 fundamentalist groups that were studied in detail. At a
March meeting in Chicago, project researchers gave him a chair with a plaque
that said in Sanskrit, "Lord of the Umbrella."

"I think I was asked to join this project because of my work in
comparative politics," he said. "My job is to try to get the other scholars
who are studying various groups to draw inferences, make comparisons and ask
questions like, 'why here and not there?' "

Shocks such as recessions and unemployment, strikes and the introduction
of foreign workers can sharpen the grievances of those who least benefited
from modernization, Almond said. They are susceptible to a variety of protest
movements, including religious ones.

Major migrations - such as Jews from Eastern Europe to the United States
and Israel, Algerian workers to France, and Italian workers from the rural
south to the industrial north - also create needs for people to affiliate
with a fundamentalist group in order to maintain or reestablish their
identity, he said.

The term fundamentalism comes from U.S. religious history, Almond said,
specifically from an early 20th-century publication, The Fundamentals. It
printed the ideas of Eastern Seaboard Protestants who believed their churches
had strayed too far from belief in the literal truth of the Bible.

"Today," Almond said, "the term has come to mean any religious group whose
leaders reach back to presumed fundamentals in order to fight against
modernity, relativism and pluralism."

The researchers have found a "family of resemblances" across religious
traditions, but they distinguish "Abrahamic" fundamentalism from other kinds.
"Judaism, Christianity and Islam with a common historic tradition, each have
holy books and explicitly codified beliefs," he said.

"Where there are explicitly authoritative texts, it is easier for
fundamentalist movements to separate themselves from the religious
establishment," Almond said. "Hinduism doesn't really have a codified
doctrine. It's got tens of thousands of pages of sacred literature, and the
Hindu traditionalists of recent decades have created a synthetic doctrine
largely in imitation of the Abrahamic tradition."

Buddhist militants in South Asia also have taken this approach. Sikhs are
the only non-Abrahamic group with a codified doctrine, he said.

Catholics who reacted against the reforms of the Vatican II Council also
can be considered fundamentalists.

"They have more of a problem resisting modernization and secularization
than Protestants because of their church's hierarchical organization," Almond
said. " As a Catholic, you risk your salvation if you break away, whereas
Protestants can take a whole congregation with them, or create a new one."

While he is looking for similarities in movements, Almond also is quick to
point out that "no two fundamentalist movements are alike."

"When you cross the lines of religious tradition, they become very
unlike," he said, "and then you must add to that the different kinds of
historical experiences people have had."

For example, "Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalism reacts against
modernization in part because they see it as an aspect of Western
imperialism," he said. "In India, the Hindus have been pressed by the secular
state to accept Muslims and Christians, and their reaction can be seen as a
kind of Bosnian phenomenon - based on long, historical hates between
ethno-religious communities."

Where ethnic nationalism seems to be the driving force, Almond prefers to
refer to groups as "fundamentalist-like." Such groups exist among Ulster's
Protestants, India's Hindus, Sinhalese Buddhists and in the Israeli Kach
movement, he said.

"The affirmation of religious tradition against secularization in these
groups is a secondary theme," he said.

Almond grew up Jewish, the son and grandson of rabbis. He was steeped in
Bible studies and says, "I have empathy for people who are religious, without
being religious myself."

At first, he said, he had doubts about the value of the research project,
which is sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and funded by
the MacArthur Foundation. Now, he's concluded that university social science
departments generally pay too little attention to religious phenomena.
Religion in some form is here to stay, the research group concluded at its
March meeting, he said.

"Some of the participants in the project also argued that fundamentalists
are making a positive contribution in the form of an effective, constructive
criticism of what's going on in modern society," Almond said. "Fundamentalism
is not something that's going to pass quickly. It is a powerful historical
reaction to modernization and westernization."

Speaking of the earlier Western view of an unproblematic progressive
future, he said, "I grew up in Chicago, where we played on clean sand beaches
that were at the head of every street ending in Lake Michigan. Then, in the
late '20s and early '30s, we saw this floating slag of ashes arriving from
the steel mills in South Chicago and Gary. As kids, we thought that was
progress," he said, smiling, shaking his head.

"We believed there was an historical trend in the direction of eliminating
ignorance, of enhancing man's understanding of himself and his environment so
that he could control its direction in positive and constructive ways."

Environmentalism and fundamentalism are not the same phenomenon, but both,
he argues, have thrived in a new "moral space" created by a "loss of
confidence on the part of the scientific and technological establishments."

"Nobody has figured out what to do with nuclear waste or about the holes
in the ozone layer, or about the population explosion, so there is a kind of
ambivalence about technology that's spreading," he said.

"And when you look at what science is discovering about man and nature,
what can you do with the big bang theory?" he asks. "I mean, if you had a
choice between the big bang as your ultimate cosmology or the creation of
Adam and Eve, you might say, 'Gosh, this Adam-and-Eve stuff is more
user-friendly.'"

Still, that does not mean science and technology have reached their
limits. "Even though technology has gotten us into a lot of problems, getting
out of them is going to take more and better technology," he said.

"Given the population of the world and the standard of living we have and
that other people aspire to, technology, science and universities are here to
stay. They simply will not have the same unambiguous claim on resources they
have had in the past."

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